Wild guess. You started running PPC ads years ago for your business. At first, they did terribly because you were still learning. Over time, performance seemed to improve. Somewhere along the way, you probably hired a professional PPC ad management company and they made some gains as well.
Now though, you’re sort of stuck with the same results, month over month. All the hours spent and incremental changes seem to have no noticeable effect. You’re now wondering whether there is any hope to increase ROAS and volume too.
If we’re right, here are a few ways to rethink what you’re doing for PPC marketing. It’s time to shake things up (in a responsible way of course). After all, your campaigns are already doing “just okay” and you don’t want to throw that out the window.
Rethink Everything
Forget small modifications to ad text, landing page creatives, headings, callout exptensions and all the other BS that your Google rep fed you. It all adds up to best practices but it’s rarely going to turn things around for you.
What you need is a complete shakeup in the user acquisition process. So, leave your office for the entire afternoon, sit in a coffee shop (alone or with your team), and brainstorm some new approaches with NO expectations. This is a time to get completely outside of the box, stand on top, and look off into the distance at what might be.
What are you going to change?
- Calls-to-action: Forget the same old calls to action. No one wants to fill out your form (as your current results show). Give them a real reason to reach out to you right now. Or for upper funnel, give them a reason to get on board with your marketing automation program. Stop! Give them a REAL reason.
- Landing page: Based on that call to action, all the LP creatives need a rebuild from the ground up to make it as front-and-center as is possible. Copy is going to be completely reworked to reflect your new objective.
- Ads: Now that we know what we’re working toward (goals and call to action), rewrite your ads to support it. Do NOT write generic ads. Write ads that setup the messaging on your LP. You don’t ask prospects to “learn more”, you ask them to do something tangible, something with benefit to them.
- Bidding strategies: Based on the CTA and goals, it’s time to rethink how you’re bidding. Maybe certain keyword sets are extremely relevant (to your new objectives) and maybe others not so much. How about putting the most relevant ad groups/keywords in a top of page position when they are a perfect fit? We may tone this back later but we need a big bump right now and sitting conservative all the time isn’t going to get us there.
Test Alongside
Now, the responsible fairy is calling. She’s saying, “Jane
Well, the World may not come to an end but drastic changes can cause drastic results and no one is completely sure in which direction. So, depending on the volume you do and the consistency in performance (especially if your campaigns always do the same thing so any change will be noticeable), switch out all of the above at once. A/B doesn’t really work here because there are too many moving parts. If you had consistent results, the trend with this change should be obvious in the numbers.
Measure and Repeat
Since you followed our advice about investing in ads (as opposed to buying ads), you have all the tracking in place to measure the results. If results are promising, build upon your new approach. If not, revert to your old campaigns and repeat this process from the beginning.
Conclusion
Small, incremental PPC management is necessary for survival. Small changes, tweaks, etc. always help. But to find new opportunities and more scale, it’s not a feasible strategy.
The truth is though that the only way to open new doors is to actually open the doors. You have to try new things, you have to try new things.
Change everything, be responsible about it, measure it, and move on. OR, call us.
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